Arguments over the future of Afghanistan and Pakistan are cropping up in other parts of Asia – including most recently Singapore, a place not always associated with thriving debates on issues of foreign policy.

Indeed, tempers boiled over at a recent two-day conference on Afghanistan in Singapore, organized by the local think tank the Institute of South Asian Studies.

Many Afghan experts in attendance blamed Pakistan for its woes, only to get equally strong responses from Pakistan.

Advertisement

“With the unequivocally abundant support funneled to the insurgents from outside the Afghan borders, insurgents are increasingly shifting tactics,” said Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, Minister and Advisor on Home Security to the Afghan President, in reference to widely-assumed beliefs that Pakistani militant groups are backing insurgents within Afghanistan’s borders. “[Afghanistan’s insurgents] are focusing on high profile targets, thus rejecting any notion that they are losing the war.”

He cautioned that the delicate progress made so far in strengthening security in Afghanistan, can reverse, if not managed well.

“Our main concern is the insurgency. We don’t have a strong arrangement with the Pakistani government about our borders,” Fawzia Koofi, a member of the Afghan parliament from Badakhshan province said.

She said the Taliban must stop getting military supplies from the other side of the border – namely, Pakistan.

Tensions were palpable as speaker after speaker blamed Pakistan. One speaker couldn’t help pointing out the irony that New Delhi — which supported the Soviet Union’s Afghan occupation in the 1980s — is now perceived in Kabul as a strategic friend, while Pakistan, which helped drive out the Soviets, is looked on as an enemy by many.

Farhat Ayesha, Pakistan’s Deputy High Commissioner in Singapore, who was in the audience, rose during the question and answer session to give the other side of the story.

“We have been hosting millions of Afghan refugees, one of the world’s largest refugee groups, for the last so many years, without much help from the international community,” Ms Ayesha said.

Pakistan has suffered heavily with its citizens losing lives because of the insurgency, she said.

Ms. Ayesha also pointed towards a personal identity checking system and fencing Pakistan is putting in place along the Afghan border and said there is reluctance in Afghanistan to replicate such fencing.

Afghan participants at the conference didn’t seem convinced.

Fencing of the border is of little use when Taliban sanctuaries are deep within Pakistan, former Afghan Minister of Interior Ali A. Jalali, now a Washington-based professor with National Defense University, said. He said Taliban sanctuaries should be removed or minimized through the cooperation of Pakistani government, and that Pakistan isn’t doing itself any favors by not tackling insurgency within its borders.

“It isn’t someone else’s war but their own war, as they are facing terrorists,” he said.

“During discussions with the Pakistani, leadership there is always good ‘talk’ but the question is how to move it to ‘walk,’” Mr. Stanekzai, the Afghan presidential advisor who is also secretary general of the High Peace Council of Afghanistan, said.

Ms. Koofi, the MP from Badakhshan, was even more skeptical about efforts to negotiate with the Taliban. “It isn’t a peace process — I call it just a ‘project’ initiated at a time when the Taliban believe they are winning the war and outrageously attacking schools for girls,” she told Southeast Asia Real Time.

While the international community slugs it out in the Afghan theatre, even Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore are worried.

“Many of our home-grown extremists were radicalized by developments in Afghanistan,” Lim Wee Kiak, chairman of Singapore’s parliamentary committee for defense and foreign affairs said at the conference.

In recent years Singapore has sent medical missions as well as trainers to the artillery school at Kabul Military Training Center.

About Southeast Asia Real Time

Indonesia Real Time provides analysis and insight into the region, which includes Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Brunei. Contact the editors at SEAsia@wsj.com.

E-commerce sites and mobile apps are drawing on data they’ve collected from users to better understand how and when people shop during the Islamic holy month. Here’s a look at some of what they’ve discovered.

All that burning rubbish in Indonesia may be taking its toll, with nearly a quarter of people surveyed in a recent poll saying waste management was the most prominent environmental issue in the country.